Desai - Discovering Your Soul Signature: A 33-Day Path to Purpose, Passion & Joy

This is a work of nonfiction.
Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2014 by Panache Desai Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

S PIEGEL & GRAU and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Desai, Panache.
Discovering your soul signature : a 33-day path to purpose, passion & joy / by Panache Desai
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8129-9558-9
ebook ISBN 978-0-8129-9559-6
1. Self-actualization (Psychology) 2. Self-realization. 3. Conduct of life.
I. Title.
BF637.S4D478 2014
158dc23 2014001759

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Jacket design: Gabriele Wilson
Jacket illustration: Joanna Andreasson
Art direction: Greg Mollica

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The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

J OSEPH C AMPBELL

It is no accident that youre here. No accident that youve found your way to this page. Life has brought you to this precise momentperhaps in the form of a divorce, a loss, a financial challenge. Maybe youve had a health scare. Or perhaps you have simply been awakened to a vague, indefinable yearning. This yearning exists inside youa hunger, a subtle gnawing awareness that there is something more. Without even knowing it, you are touching upon a deep wish. It is your wish to find your most authentic expression.

Something about life the way youve been living it isnt quite working. Whether your challenges are large or smallwhether your problems are visible or invisibleyou are suffused with this yearning. I have news for you: We all are. To be human and to walk this planet is to experience a myriad of complex emotions.

So you are here. How youve gotten here no longer matters. What is essentialin fact, miraculousis the fact that you have made it.

Welcome! Your spirit has brought you to these words.

We do not choose the work we are brought into this lifetime to do. That work is your soul signatureyour unique expression. Your spiritual DNA.

It is who you are at your coreyour singular contribution to the world. It doesnt have to do with seeking fame or fortunethough it mightbut rather with the accumulated essence of everything you have ever been, thought, felt, done, or experienced in your entire life.

By way of illustration, let me tell you how I discovered my own soul signature. As a very young boy, I spent every possible moment in the meditation room of my grandparents home in East London. If I was fussy or having a tantrum, I calmed down the moment I crossed the threshold of that room. I sat there each morning and watched my grandmother pray. She chanted the Guru Gita, a devotional prayer to awaken the remembrance of the light within. My grandmother had beautiful long black hair and wore a sari. She smelled of coconut oil. She prayed for every one of us: for health, well-being, abundance. She closed her eyes and counted her mala beads. She read from the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita. Devotional songs were always playing on a cassette player. The very air felt sacred in that room. Sacred, safe, profoundly loving, and strong. And though I didnt understand it at the time, it was the one place in the world where I felt at home. For the first five years of my life, I existed in a pristine vibrational environment. The sole focus of everyones attention was on the Divine.

And then it was gone.

My parents and I left that crowded home in East London when I was five years old, in search of better schools, a better way of life. I was an only child, solitary and shy. I felt absolutely disconnected from all that loving abundance I had been exposed to and wondered if I was being punished. How had I ended up in this extended timeout?

We moved a number of times subsequently. I went to two different middle schools. During my high school years, we wound up back in East London, in a poor, working-class neighborhood where everybody was just trying to get through the day. It was my introduction to feeling pain. I felt everything inside everybody. I felt all the fear-based and survival-based energy swirling around me. And even though wed visit my grandparents on the weekends, the meditation room no longer called to me. I no longer felt its magic. I was a teenager and didnt really want to be spending Saturday nights meditating with a bunch of grown-ups.

I had no tools for the jungle of teenage life in East London. I was a sensitive, openhearted kid. I didnt understand why people were cruel to one another. People were beating each other up, everybody trying to dominate. Eventuallyit had to happenI got bullied. I didnt fit in with any group. I didnt tell my mom and dad what was happening. I cried myself to sleep some nights. I questioned why I was alive. What was the point?

The pain became great enough that I needed to find ways to numb it. I rejected my soul signature, moved away from my own unique expression of energyand in so doing, I paid a price. In my late teens, I found my way into drugs, alcohol, and the music scene. I dropped out of university. I was like the proverbial frog in boiling watereverything around me growing hotter and hotter, more and more unmanageable, until I was dying, drowning without even knowing it. I had a radio show, ran raves and events as part of Londons music scene, but the pain inside me was escalating. I had no interest in spirituality. I had completely stepped away from it. I stopped visiting my grandparents. The meditation room was like a figment of my past, an image from a long-lost dream. I couldnt picture it anymore. I couldnt possibly set foot in it.

In 2001, I received a wake-up call in the form of a fist-fight with three people in a local bar. One guy head-butted me, and they all piled on. Bouncers came over, and I got pulled out. Later that night, someone was shot. I was very lucky to be in one piece. That nightin a single momentthe drinking, the drugs, the music stopped. I was done. Tapped out. I recognized the blessing in what had happened. I also recognized that I had been given this lesson in a very mild way. If I hadnt heeded itas happens in lifethe lessons would have gotten louder, more dangerous and damaging.

Without exactly knowing how, I had an inchoate sense that I needed to find a way to connect once again with the energy I had connected with as a child. I needed, once again, to remember my soul signature.

There is no hierarchy when it comes to soul signatures. My soul signature has been a spiritual path. Yours might be inspiring children, coaching young people to fulfill their destiny, bringing your own unique set of gifts to bear on the world around you. As Dr. Martin Luther King once said, If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. Your soul signature is authentically your own. Only you can share your particular soul signature on this earth. It is as individual as a fingerprint. Your soul signature resides at the deepest core of who you are and permeates every aspect of your life.

I knew that I had to go home, to a place where the energy was a match for me. I said goodbye to my parents and traveled to an ashram in the United States, where I stayed for six months. I performed selfless service, working in the kitchen, cooking giant vats of vegetarian food for hundreds of people on retreat. But I was a lousy yogi. I would go into the morning meditation and fall asleep in the meditation room, day after day. I would have failed guru school. I was angry, sad, lonely, and lost. All the emotions I had been stuffing for all those years came rising to the surface. But still, there was something deeply nurturing for me about being in the energy of that meditation room, because it reminded me of growing up. I could be at peace there.